David Buckel's Final Letter to the World Before Self-Immolating
Today I am sharing the letter that David Buckel sent to major media outlets just minutes before he set himself on fire in the early morning hours of April 14th, 2018 at Prospect Park in Brooklyn, New York.
In a note that he left by his body for first responders to find, he wrote “I am David Buckel and I just killed myself by fire as a protest suicide. I apologize to you for the mess.”
As far as I can tell, Buckel’s letter has never been shared by the outlets he sent it to. This, frankly, is a disgrace. Buckel self-immolated in order to call attention to humanity’s destruction of the livable environment through fossil-fuel extraction and burning. His words were meant to be read. It was and is a profound dishonor to Buckel’s life, his memory, and his chosen death to hide his final words away. The man literally set himself on fire. The very least we can do is honor his words.
As I wrote before about Buckel, he was 60-years old at the time of his death and he left behind a husband, a daughter, and a co-parenting lesbian couple with whom he and his husband raised their daughter. Buckel was formerly a lawyer for the marriage equality project at Lambda Legal where he took on and strategized high profile court cases. After leaving Lambda Legal, Buckel went on to run a volunteer composting site at Red Hook Community Farm in Brooklyn, New York where he worked for a decade.
Buckel gave little indication to his friends or family about his plans to self-immolate. His family said that he had grown increasingly concerned and serious about the climate crisis, but that he did not show any signs of depression. Buckel’s husband wrote later, “None of us — not family, not friends — had any idea of the depth of my husband’s desperation.”
Others, though sympathetic, could not understand or simply misread why Buckel chose to die this way. Mary Pilon, who came across Buckel’s scorched body while she was on a run that morning, wrote, “As much as I respect Buckel’s work and mission, it’s hard for me to see his action as anything beyond a profound act of suffering. As I stood dumbstruck, staring at his corpse on that spring Saturday, I saw it as an act of defiance, but also a cry against life.”
I am telling you, Pilon and those who think like her are dead wrong. I am very serious about this because I have looked quite closely at the cases of those who have self-immolated in response to America’s war in Vietnam, the climate crisis, and most recently the genocide of Palestinians. This has become a sort of obsession of mine, to the point where I have been collecting long out of print self-published books, letters, and articles both about and by the self-immolators of the Vietnam War era. I have been trying to track down the dwindling number of people who knew these self-immolators to get first hand accounts of who they were. Their stories are sadly little told or remembered, and frankly I feel responsible to them to keep their stories alive. I have spent a lot of time studying the words of these self-immolators, written or otherwise. This is why I can confidently say: those who choose this form of death do not hate life. They are not mentally ill. They are not deluded. They are not even without hope. Their words prove this. They are, instead, very morally serious people driven to a desperate extreme because they have concluded, correctly, that the systems of oppression which govern our lives and the lives of everyone we will ever love do not allow for meaningful democratic change of those systems. As Buckel wrote, “As an attorney, I worked eight years for others’ freedom from poverty, and thirteen years for others’ freedom from discrimination. But work for freedom fails as we slowly turn Earth into a prison.” And so, in service of life, in the hope that their action will change things, these people rebel against the systems of death by sacrificing themselves in one of the most dramatic ways possible.
The attempt to write off these climate immolations as mere suicides carried out by the depressed, the insane, or the misguided is a common strain in Western thought. Our society is not able to comprehend people like Buckel and their actions because we have totally spurned the ability to be morally serious people, along with the vulnerability, earnestness, and humanity which this requires. As Susan Sontag wrote, “Some people will do anything to keep themselves from being moved.” When someone like Buckel comes along and lights themselves on fire, they indict the whole of our broken society. I am telling you, if for nothing more than our mere survival, let alone moral integrity: we cannot ignore the messages of people like Buckel, as much as we’d like to. They are the vanguard that says, either do something about this, or we will all continue to perish. “We are but darkened groping souls, that know not the light often because of its very blinding radiance,” wrote W.E.B. du Bois in his biography of radical abolitionist John Brown. “Only in time is truth revealed. … and ever and again after the world has complacently dodged and compromised with, and skillfully evaded a great evil, there shines, suddenly, a great white light — an unwavering, unflickering brightness, blinding by its all-seeing brilliance, making the whole world simply a light and a darkness — a right and a wrong. … It is at once surprising, baffling and pitiable to see the way in which men — honest American citizens — faced this light.”
I am asking you, at the very least, to face this light. That, if nothing else, is what David Buckel wanted. And so, below is David Buckel’s final letter in full:
a life giver Ending a life of privilege can give life to others. Privilege usually comes in some way from others’ pain, whether intended or, more often, not. The pain may be from exploitation, as is often true in the making of clothes and food crops, and our choice to buy such clothing or food supports the harm to exploited humans, animals, or the Earth. That harm can live on through so many other choices we make, not just with what we wear and what we eat. A life of privilege requires actions to balance the harm caused, and the greater the privilege, the greater the responsibility. For if one does not leave behind a world better for having lived in it, all that remains are selfish ends, sometimes wrapped in family or nation. When in history selfish ends are wrapped in nation, the noble young among us often serve as soldiers and return home knowing they were used wrongly, honor squandered, asking “what was it all for?” Seldom are we more despicable than when we misuse honor. Not so when the noble are needed for an honest defense against human aggression. But more vast than human aggression is human selfishness, and against it a larger army of the noble must stand. For those of us with long lives of privilege, it is not enough to say we have lived for family or nation -- that is still at the cost of other beings on the Earth or the Earth itself, to one degree or another, one family or nation at the cost of another family or nation. Of a thousand consequences, one terrifying example of our times is the suicide vest -- an instrument for life takers, to kill oneself as a way to kill others who are seen as exploiters. Of course trying to make the world a better place does not mean that the world may in fact be a better place, but just better than it would have been had we not lived in it – sadly, as we live many other humans live and leave the world a worse place for having lived in it. And for the honorable effort, it’s not enough to donate money to strike the balance. Rarely can the money match the effect of privilege, and the recipient organizations who claim to reduce harm are subject to the same selfish human nature underlying the harm they seek to address -- the human tendency toward comfort and its partner, exploitation. That leads many groups (not all) to use the money more for their own salaries and benefits than to achieve their mission, and many groups’ leaders to see the work more as a matter of personal legacy than meaningful positive change for others. Government can be similarly prey, choosing to help but losing the way, pulled along by human nature’s tilt toward selfishness. Many who drive their own lives to help others often realize that they do not change what causes the need for their help. Endless bandaging does not stop future wounds. Even victims, once harmed and then empowered -- thus enabled to choose how to treat others less privileged -- too often choose to exploit. Thus the challenge for the privileged young is to navigate wisely and change course timely to stop future wounds, rather than be consumed by bandaging. Find the path that helps lead humans toward unselfishness. On that, many religions have failed, most obvious when religious groups harm each other, or most hidden when religious leaders build a bureaucracy to serve and protect themselves. But many individuals have succeeded, most often in obscurity, and that is a reason for the privileged young to live and strive on in service to the less privileged. There is no shame in privilege if it is used in service to those without privilege, and beware those who shame the privileged more to make themselves feel good than genuinely to work for and benefit others. All sorts of actions may help strike a balance between anyone’s weight in privilege and corresponding weight in responsibility to others. A quiet selflessness, strengthening community while diminishing one’s own negative impact, can help balance. A loud selflessness, on a large stage, will likely over time tilt back toward the selfish. The larger army of the noble tends to blend in, and ego stays in check. It is likely necessary in the struggle toward balance to give it a lifetime, however much time is clocked for giving rather than taking. But after long years of effort it may be clear that staying in the world is doing more harm than good because the balance can no longer be struck through to the natural end of one’s life, for one or some of a hundred reasons. Just as it is not enough to live merely for family or nation, and not enough to give money, it may be not be enough to take as much responsibility as one can, day after day. A lifetime of service may best be preserved by giving a life. Honorable purpose in life invites honorable purpose in death. This is not new, as many have chosen to give a life based on the view that no other action can most meaningfully address the harm they see. Witness one example: self-immolations in support of a free Tibet, sometimes by parents forced to the heart-breaking conclusion that a parent dying creates more value for children than a parent living. But those parents were not privileged. I am privileged, with a nice life at 60 years of age, and good health to the final moment. Privilege is feeling heavier than responsibility met. Obviously there are countless ways that humans harm other humans, animals, and the Earth, and thus countless causes to serve by giving a life. I choose just one, not because I claim that it is more important, but because it happens to give me the courage I will need to die in the hope it is an honorable death that might serve others. As an attorney, I worked eight years for others’ freedom from poverty, and thirteen years for others’ freedom from discrimination. But work for freedom fails as we slowly turn Earth into a prison. Pollution ravages our planet, oozing inhabitability via air, soil, water and weather. Some have already lost houses, family, and nations, a fate that waits for all as the decades pass. We’re killing humans and other beings slowly by killing our shared home. Most humans on the planet now breathe air made unhealthy by fossil fuels, and many die early deaths as a result -- my early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves. Our present grows more desperate; our future needs more than what we’ve been doing. Although solutions lay partly in laws, no power will match that of individuals in large numbers who change their everyday choices and reduce the harm they cause. Here is a hope that giving a life might bring some attention to the need for expanded action, and help others give a voice to our home, and Earth is heard. David Buckel